Apartment

The opening sequence of Le mépris (J.-L. Godard, 1963) consists of a camera track, first following a female character on a street of Rome’s Cinécittà in order to finally move itself into the center of the frame. This camera that records its own image thus uncovers the very structure on which a film production is based. In this mirror image, it appears as an uncanny doppelganger.

The central subject of the video Apartment that is based on a scene of J.-L. Godard’s Le mépris (1963) can be said to be the intersection of human and technological gaze. The work focuses on the central and over-long sequence in which Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli portrait a couple who are about to split up. If the subjectives assigned to the two characters are interrupted by a kind of virtual visual focus in the Godardian sequence, then only to present the spatial separateness of the two bodies that continuously move about a labyrinthine apartment, which is here reconstructed as digital architecture. The Godardian mise-en-scene is radicalized by applying the technical, unshared, outer gaze of the virtual camera on Bardot's body, thus making it dependant on its positions and movements. The characters no longer disappear – as they do in the film – into the frame or out of the frame; they are also no longer measures of spatial representations. All that remains of the body of Bardot / Camille in this emptied virtual space is a mere trace of movement – in the same way that the trace of film bodies in “travelling” can only be guessed via the changing focus. It seems that Bardot’s body – object of desire and projection surface for sexual fantasies – has transformed into a visual organ, into an instrument of perception, an eye apparatus wandering through the empty apartment just by itself.

The monotonous, steady and uninterrupted track of the camera emphasizes the movement’s “neutral” character even more. The void of the body-gaze corresponds to the space’s emptiness. The body-gaze represents an absent body, renders the space visible and refers to the eye of the viewer at the same time. The relation between the characters is blueprinted within the virtual architecture in order to represent their spatial and emotional relations.

The attention here shifts from an action in space to an action through space. A chronogram of an animated gaze is sketched out – a gaze which observes the formation of space through the passing of time, thus rendering a visual representation of time as well, a time-image. The invisibility of the camera corresponds to the character’s invisibility – the object becomes the objective.

The absence of narrative leads to an abundance of image and movement. The representations of those movements deal with issues linking to the temporality of narration and to the means by which it appears. The perception of reality is framed through media formats, the world recorded to storage media, copied to hard drives, captured on film and video… images transformed into luminances, electrical signals, particles arranged on magnetic tape pointing into all different kinds of directions, only to return their charge in the form of projections back to actual spaces.

Giuliana Bruno, Homescape

As it moves between outside and inside, film pictures the architecture of the interior, writing the history of private life. Many films participate in this writing, but some do it intensely and primarily by way of architecture. Architectural views of interiors are found throughout the history of the world's cinema and particularly mark Japanese film, especially the work of Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. Our travelogue, however, will concentrate on architectural views that have made Western private life publicly available, beginning with one particularly salient example.

Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) tours in and out of the home(land), moving from bodyscape to homescape. At the beginning of the film, the camera frames Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul (Michel Piccoli)—a man who wears his hat in the bathtub—as they lie in bed in their Roman apartment. Bardot, reclining naked on her back in the foreground, creates a dictionary of her body in the mode of amorous discourse, enumerating each of its parts, one by one, with her lover. Traveling the map of her body, Camille asks Paul to "locate" his love for her. Does he love her feet, ankle, knees, thighs, backside, hair, breasts? And can he now caress her, touch her shoulders? The camera extends this caress to her, moving as if it were his hands across her back and then up to her face, to her mouth, eyes, and ears. Yes, he loves her, he tells her, "totally, tenderly, tragically."

In this intimate love scene—one of the most intimate in film history—Camille's list creates an embodied taxonomy for a "tender" archive. This is an anatomy lesson of a particular kind: reclining as her own "Waxen Venus," she does not anatomize in order to dissect .That is, her construction of body parts does not imply a parsing. She surveys the landscape of her body in a single take that contains both the singularity and the multiplicity of a mapping. Indeed, this take is a chart. It is a filmic Carte de Tendre. The vista explored by Camille is a scenography straight from Scudéry—the making of a sentimental landscape. The long take is a map of amorous transport, a filmic map of tenderness.

Having introduced us to a sentimental landscape by way of a body map, the film proceeds to explore the couple's life. Their marriage is disintegrating, a crisis rendered architecturally via the doomed purchase of a home. Paul has accepted an offer to work for a crass American film producer in order to pay the mortgage on their new Roman apartment. His assignment is to rewrite the script for a film version of The Odyssey directed by Fritz Lang, who plays himself. Around the notion of home ownership, contempt begins to set in.

The text of The Odyssey, which includes the course of Ulysses' travel and Penelope's in-house voyage, provides an interesting subtext for the film's amorous navigation. Contempt develops in the space where domestic life resides, tracing the unfolding of the couple's daily life in an architectural narrative. The camera travels creatively on a path that proceeds through the unfinished glass door of the bathroom, from kitchen to living room, and into the bedroom. It captures the characters' deteriorating relationship by mapping it onto objects of love and design-onto "bed and sofa"—and by retelling it as an odyssey in and out of rooms, in between and around spaces. It is a landscape that resonates with the scenography and sound track of the opening scene.

Framed by Lang's ironic comment that CinemaScope is “good only for funerals and snakes," the widescreen format of Contempt functions to enhance the scope" of architecture in the environment. This includes the location of the apartment, which is situated just outside the historic center of Rome. Like Antonioni in L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), Godard engages modern architecture. Both films are essays on urban planning that survey the transitional life of Italian cities during the so-called economic miracle. In Contempt, as in The Eclipse, we watch a new city in the making, with a focus on the unfinished. Antonioni's urban meditation constantly returns to buildings in construction, lingering on their parts as if they were already incipient ruins. The opening and ending sequences of the film are passages in which architecture and film articulate each other. From the moment Monica Vitti appears in a silent exploration of a "house divided" to the shot of the window that opens to reveal a new city, to the ending, in which the characters exit to make room for an extradiegetic urban exploration, the film portrays the "eclipse" of the classic image of Rome. Squared squares, the geometry of buildings, the stripes of the new urban crossing—all are Rome as it is being turned into a modern city, built on the margins of the historic center despite the picture—postcard vision that would ignore this phenomenon. The middle-class section of this plan is precisely the urban landscape of Contempt, which presents the transformation of the countryside into the new residential quarters of the city.

Contempt dwells on the marriage of film and architecture in many ways, including a visit to Cinecittà, the Italian film studio whose name means literally "cine city." We visit a film theater where a marquee displays the title of Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy, 1953), a clear citation to a film we will investigate in depth later. Framed against a poster of Voyage in Italy, the actors of Contempt inform us that they are making both the actual and the sentimental voyage of Rossellini's film. Following the script of the cinematic-architectural grand tour, the film takes us on an actual "Voyage in Italy": the couple travels to Capri, where their marriage continues to fall apart. The last part of Contempt takes place on the famed island, which is also, not coincidentally, the location of the "mise en abyme" remake of The Odyssey that takes the shape of the difficult navigation of the couple's love affair.

The end of the story is played out in a house that is "to die for"; indeed, Camille is literally led to her death there. The Capri location enables Godard to exhibit an unusual lyrical touch in conveying landscape; he luxuriates in several views of the island's deep blue sea and open sky. This filmic landscape is contingent on architecture, made possible by a house named Casa Malaparte. The residence of the novelist Curzio Malaparte, it was largely designed by its inhabitant, who was responsible for articulating the amazing shape that Godard so coveted. Geography models this domestic architecture. The house is built on the entire length of a narrow promontory, on a cliff that extends out into the Mediterranean and drops some 650 feet into it. Casa Malaparte's most striking feature is a giant staircase, set in dialogue with the topography, that was made from one of the exterior walls and transforms a domestic ascent to the rooftop into a Mayan affair. Godard plays a cinematic game with this staircase, engaging in monumentalization by way of a highangle shot and with a fluid rendition of the architectural slant.

The film shows the house as a cinematic incline and engages its material resistance. In fact, at the top of the stairs, a white wall appears, which functions to block the open sea view one might expect to encounter there. The wall that materializes in front of us can be circumvented, however. Slowly degrading at the top, this wall filmically defines the set of the vista and opens a gradual view of the panorama. As we have learned from the panoramic travel genre, a panoramic view unfolds as we move around the wallscreen. It is only appropriate, then, that Fritz Lang, a filmmaker obsessed with architecture (he trained as an architect and had been a painter) would make an Odyssey on this filmic rooftop. It is no wonder that Godard would film it.

from: Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, Giuliana Bruno. Verso New York 2002